The Snowden Effect: Intelligence Design

There was an interesting exchange on Bill Maher's show Friday night in which Paul Reickhoff and Glenn Greenwald on the topic of the consequences of the revelations by Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage. I admire both men to varying degrees and, watching it, I have to admit, I saw no evidence of floor-mopping by either side, but I am just one of those goofy children who don't understand How The World Works. But I agreed with Reickhoff that sending even a small force of American soldiers into whatever it is into which Iraq is devolving, and then saying that they wouldn't be in combat, is very close to the silliest thing this president ever has said. However, the real meat of the discussion was an exchange in which Reickhoff challenged Greenwald to prove that Snowden's revelations hadn't yet gotten anyone killed, and Greenwald came back at him by asking him for the names of anyone who has been killed as a result of Snowden's revelations. Maher then leaped in and said that we would never know the answer to Greenwald's question because we don't know when our operatives have been killed. Alas for Maher, and for the mopped-floor brigade, this ain't necessarily so.

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The CIA, and the rest of the intelligence community, always has been willing to tell us the names of its operatives who are killed, if such revelations further the intelligence community's domestic political agenda. For example, in 1975, when the Church Committee was gearing up to demonstrate to the country that the CIA had been lawless and out of control almost from its founding, the CIA wasted no time in pinning the assassination of Richard Welch, the agency's station chief in Athens, on the fact that Welch had been outed in a magazine to whichrenegade spy Philip Agee was a contributor, even though Agee had not written the article in which Welch had been named. (This murder resulted in the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982, which was applauded by former CIA director, and then-vice-president George H.W. Bush. Of course, 31 years later, this was the law that the people working for Bush's wayward son would ignore/break by outing Valerie Plame. Life's a funny old dog, isn't it?) In 1984, the CIA did not object when the death by torture of Beirut station chief William Buckley was used by the various criminals in the Reagan administration as a humanitarian alibi for the crimes of Iran-Contra. Given that the entire intelligence community would like to serve up Snowden en brochette, it's far from unreasonable to assume that, if there was definitive evidence that Snowden's leaks have resulted in the death of an American agent, or even if a fairly plausible lie to that effect could be constructed, it would be in the New York Times by the next morning. But, again, I am someone who fails to understand How The World Works. For example, that Snowden-inspired war between Indonesia and Australia completely eluded my notice.